Maybe it is just me, but I couldn't stop that hackneyed old cliché, "what goes around, comes around", wafting over me at the recent Microsoft Devcon event in London.

There was a presentation that touched on the subject of Office applications running on the server rather than the client, and in particular on SharePoint Server. This would mean that users could build a sort of nirvana where there is just a version of the truth. For example, there might be just one, approved Excel spreadsheet in use for calculating mortgages, rather than a surfeit of slightly different ones on different users' machines. This, it was proposed, should be considered a "good thing".

Well yes, 'tis true it should be. And was. I sat there and thought: "This sounds really quite similar to what was achievable with mainframes, all those years ago."

I guess that, one day, the batch process will be reinvented. ®